Aujourd'hui Encorebegan as a casual discussion between Yves Trépanier and myself about the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal 2016 exhibition ELLESAujourd'hui, which featured the work of Marie-Claude Bouthillier, Wanda Koop, Christine Major, Angèle Verret, Carol Wainio, and Janet Werner.

ELLES Aujourd'hui’s curatorial thematic focused upon the medium of painting and how the exhibition’s featured artists negotiate with abstraction, figuration, hybridity, and counter-narratives within their painting production. From this conversation evolved a list of artists we both admire who engaged with these issues from a multiplicity of mediums and methods, and how the tensions of representation and its manufacture is an inextricable pivot point within their work.

This was how Yves and I began this project, and together we generated many lists of artists and sub themes, which brought us to the conclusion that this conversation should be physically realized not only in exhibition form, but within the breadth of multiple combinations and permutations at the gallery.

Many of the works in this exhibition have never been shown before, and were made exclusively for this exhibition, and based entirely upon the participating artists’ interests. Of primary concern to us was to put artists together that we admire without an over-determined or dictated curatorial framework - to prioritize trust in the strength of the artist and her work to develop unanticipated and meaningful linkages, disruptions, and breaks, both individually and as a grouping within this exhibition, which we hope, is the first of several.

The Crossing Over Place is an exhibition about negotiation. It is about navigating irreducible and unresolved cultural and racial borders. Featuring artists who cross these borders, this exhibition invites viewers to consider the alienating and strategic labor of cultural navigation, especially in the context of a “progressive” and fast-growing American city. Seattle—a city of professional global transplants and historically displaced peoples—reverberates as a site of translation, mimicry, intersection, and “crossing over” between peoples and living history. Appropriately, the exhibition is titled after the Whulshootseed Salish place-name for Seattle.

Often these irreducible borders intersect. How does one live in between these untranslatable cultural borders? How does one speak, standing just outside a crossing over place? This labor of negotiation invites and implicates.

We abandon the idea of fixed being …. The history of a transplanted population,but one which elsewhere becomes another people, allows us toresist generalization and the limitations it imposes.—Édouard Glissant

As part of the Artist-in-Residence program, the McCord Museum will host Algonquin multidisciplinary artist Nadia Myre, who will draw inspiration from Victorian (1837-1901) women’s periodicals and publications to create her work. From these texts, instructions for the creation of four aboriginal inspired objects will be read aloud to the artist, with the omission of any hints as to the nature of the objects. She will thus follow the instructions without any knowledge beforehand of what they describe. The resulting works will be exhibited next to objects drawn from the Museum’s ethnological collection, illustrating a decolonial gesture as a process for the recovery of a Native identity.

Bringing together diverse artists from different backgrounds, Myth of Fishesexamines eight radically distinct feminist interpretations of nature. The exhibition, in part, takes its name from Rhonda Abrams’ 1985 short film of the same name, in which a woman’s first fishing experience results in a comic-opera of uncertainty where everyone involved as well as the objects emerge with physical and emotional contusions.

A near-rhyming alliteration, Myth of Fishes is a tongue-twister, stretching the imagination, flipping the lips and slipping the S’s as the mind grasps at the species of fishes in the seas, streams, oceans and lakes, evoking the North Vancouver Island community’s history (and prehistory) with fishing.

Myth is a story passed through time, person to person, linked here with the fish or the symbol of shared plenty.Myth of Fishes is the expression of eight artists speaking through their diverse practices and conceptual engagements. Notions of nature as a pure realm apart from the human are redefined through political ecology, indigenous rights struggle, and feminism.

Sybil Andrews is an internationally renowned linocut artist who produced work from the late 1920’s through 1988. Born in England and emigrating to Campbell River in 1947, her influence in the Campbell River community was and continues to be profound. The linocut, Wings, will be Andrews’ contribution to the exhibition. The print is typical of Andrews’ style and rhythm, exploring the action of people, air, and birds in an agricultural scene. The work is part of the Campbell River Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection, presented to the Gallery by the Campbell River Arts Council upon opening.

Claire Falkenberg is a visual artist who works in photography, paint, collage and sculpture to make landscape-based images and constructions. Born in Toronto, living and working in Brooklyn NY, Falkenberg’s large-scale photo and oil paint collages are at once mysterious and familiar, reimagining the Canadian landscape. Her photographs layer the picturesque with refuse and grime, working through understandings of beauty and materiality. Falkenberg has exhibited nationally, including a nuclear power plant in Pickering ON.

Meghna Haldar is an independent filmmaker based in Vancouver, originally from Bangalore, India. Haldar’s contribution to Myth of Fishes includes the three-part video installation, Bol (Speak!) inspired by the famous poem by Pakistani Marxist, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and is about an act of violence. Each film contends with shattering events that took place in 2008 in Haldar’s hometown, as well as newspaper headlines of related violence. The film project was made in partnership with Katkatha, a puppet troupe working with social justice and women’s rights in India, and Guru Shashidhara Nair, a Chauu dance exponent with a soundtrack designed by Jesse Zubot, Gael MacLean and Simon Goulet that features contribution by throat singers, Tanya Tagaq and Celina Kalluk.

Olia Mishchenko was born in Kiev, Ukraine and moved to Canada in 1997. She studied architecture and art history at the University of Toronto prior to becoming a practicing artist. Mishchenko’s practice consists predominantly of drawings based on, and concerned with, built environments. Mishchenko’s drawings are incredibly precise, controlled and detail-oriented, a result of studious applications of the aesthetic of architectural drawings and blueprints. Four drawings from Mishchenko’s Don Blanche series will be exhibited that show an interesting relationship between land and people, living, exploring and making.

Nadia Myre is a contemporary visual artist of Algonquin heritage living in Montreal, QC, known for using small, craft-based media to affect aesthetic and political shock-waves. Included in this exhibition, Meditations on Red #1utilizes traditional Algonquin beadwork to open a healing verse into wounding and resilience. This work is described as a large, textured tondos resembling gongs, planets, mandalas, or darkened pools with ripples extending radially from their centres. Closer inspection reveals a digitized universe of intertwined glass seed beads of varying shapes, sizes, and colours. The audience will receive this large print as they leave Haldar’s Bol (Speak!)video installation as a moment of meditation and as a mirroring of the trauma exposed in both works.

Wendy Red Star is a multi-media artist based in Portland, Oregon who is of Crow Indian and Irish background. Red Star’s work explores the intersection between life on the Crow Indian reservation and the world outside of that environment. She thinks of herself as an Indigenous cultural archivist speaking sincerely about the experience of being Crow in contemporary society. Red Star’s contribution to Myth of Fishes is the photographic series, The Four Seasons that are staged self-portraits of the artist using artificial costumerie and landscapes as well as symbolic references to indigeneity.

Jennifer Stillwell is a contemporary Canadian sculpture and installation artist based in Victoria, BC. Stillwell’s artistic practice comments on Canadian landscape and labour, often utilizing domestic and industrial techniques. Stillwell’s sculpture, A Piece of Turf, included here in Myth of Fishes, is a hand-hooked rug whose weave is based upon natural grass patterns derived from architectural design. This textile piece takes on the architectural cues and the humourist qualities among the group exhibition, consequently interacting with the interventionist work by Holly Ward within the physical space among the two-dimensional works and video installation included.

Holly Ward is a Vancouver, Berlin and Heffley Creek-based interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Her Myth of Fishes gallery intervention and installation, Island, is a large pile of soil that must be moved by gallery staff and volunteers once a week for the duration of the exhibition. Stemming from research into various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, Ward’s work investigates the arbitrary nature of signs, and the value of forms in both personal and public contexts.

An aggregate of all the works mentioned, Myth of Fishes is a woven whole comprised of collective vision, bound by each of the artists’ practices and conceptual logic, through which the past and present collapse onto each other, reflecting, refracting, fueled by the warp and weft of what we have come to know and unknow of “nature”. Within the gallery space, the female is extolled as natural, simulation, (un)controllable, irrevocably linked with politics and social convention. Myth of Fishes heeds the necessary call for change in our current environmental and civil rights situation in Canada. This exhibition reflects the call through creativity, exposing the cynical, the blunt, and the nuanced truths from eight artists. The core question of the human-nature relationship as interpreted through a feminist perspective, mirrors a recurrent discourse in contemporary art at large, and corresponds to the overall focus of the gallery’s program.

Blurring the line between theatre and multimedia installation, A Casual Reconstruction is a scripted reading of an unscripted dinner conversation between a group of local First Nations people surrounding issues of Native Identity as they discus their everyday experience of living in three cultures French, English and Indigenous.

Nation to Nation brings together five exceptional artists whose practices explore way of thinking through colonization. Through a range of media, sites and strategies, these artists will bring local and non-local, Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives to a discussion about cultural perceptions of “nation,” and nation-to-nation relationships. This discussion will be propelled by the artists’ research and explorations into the Mnjikaning Fish Weirs National Historic Site and the arrival of Samuel de Champlain to the Orillia/Rama area exactly 400 years ago.

Curated by Tania Willard, Aboriginal Curator in Residence at the Kamloops Art Gallery.

CUSTOM MADE focuses on artists working with skills-based artistic production within a contemporary context. It looks at ways artists are re-learning skill-based arts like beadwork and basketry and how they are relating these skills to cultural heritage, new materials, concepts and techniques. CUSTOM MADE frames a dialogue between artists whose work crosses boundaries, challenging and conflating binaries of art and craft, contemporary and traditional. The selected artists investigate notions of identity and culture through forms such as the re- purposing of found objects, moose hair tufting and kinetic art.

Located at the corner of 5th and Victoria in downtown Kamloops, the Kamloops Art Gallery is a public art museum that features changing exhibitions of regional, national and international art with a contemporary and historic focus.

Presentation of works

The perception of the body is one of the themes underlying the artistic approach and theoretical research of choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde. After interviewing various specialists throughout the world, she resolved to share her findings with other artists and researchers. In 2012, she thus brought together eight visual and media artists, five dancers and two theoreticians to consider how the profound social, cultural and technological changes in modern societies are affecting the way we conceptualize and interpret the body. Offering a kaleidoscopic view of the body, the creation- exhibition Le corps en question(s)/The Body in Question(s) was presented in its world premiere at the Festival TransAmériques at the Galerie de l’UQAM. Two years later, this hybrid work has spawned two other eponymous works, equally hybrid: an exhibition catalogue containing essays by scientists, historians and theoreticians, which pursue and extend the themes of the creation-exhibition; and an interactive web creation in which Internet users can immerse themselves in some twenty scenes based on the original work, and access all texts from the publication, as well as behind-the-scenes documents related to the creative process (texts, photographs, audio-visual material).

For the first time in Western Canada, the WAG is honoured to host the exhibition of shortlisted artists for the Sobey Art Award—the pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art. Announced November 19, the recipient of the 2014 Sobey Art Award is Nadia Myre of Québec.

The Sobey Art Award: The New MastersOver two shows, CBC's DEAS will profile the five regional finalists. The programs air at 9 p.m. (9:30 p.m. NT) on December 15 & 22, 2014, and are produced in partnership with The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Listen to Part 1 here.

About the Sobey Art Award:The Sobey Art Award was created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation. It is an annual prize given to an artist age 40 and under who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated. A total of $100,000 in prize money is awarded annually; $50,000 to the winner; $10,000 to the other four finalists; and $500 to each of the remaining longlisted artists. Since its inception, the Sobey Art Award and accompanying exhibition have been organized and administered by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

About the Sobey Art Foundation:The Sobey Art Foundation was established in 1981 with a mandate to carry on the work of entrepreneur and business leader the late Frank H. Sobey, of collecting and preserving representative examples of 19th and 20th century Canadian art. One of the finest private collections of its kind, the Sobey Art Foundation has assembled exemplary works from Canadian Masters like Cornelius Krieghoff, Tom Thomson, and J.E.H. MacDonald.

About the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia:The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is the largest art museum in Atlantic Canada, with a mission to engage people with art. The Gallery houses the province’s art collection and offers a range of exceptional exhibitions, education, and public programming.